Come In From The Craziness

Lincoln in the Bardo – George Saunders

William Wallace “Willie” Lincoln was the third son of Abraham and Mary Lincoln. After his father's election as president, Willie moved into the White House with his parents and younger brother Tad. Because Congress stinted funds for the upkeep of the residence, furniture was broken, curtains torn, and rats proliferated in the basement. Perhaps from drinking contaminated water, both Willie and Tad contracted typhoid fever in February of 1862.

In this unique historical novel from 2017, Saunders quotes fascinating testimony of Willie’s suffering. The witnesses were staff serving the first family and guests of a lavish gala that the Lincolns felt obligated to host, to demonstrate the government could function normally despite the war. The author draws from first-hand documentation such as Mrs. Keckley’s book and secondary sources such as Margaret Leech’s Pulitzer-winning popular history Reveille in Washington. But to show the vagaries of memory and the resulting unreliability of witnesses, Saunders quotes people who remember that the night of the reception was moonless and people who recall the full moon was beautiful that night.

Willie died a painful death, his small intestines perforated by infection, allowing bacteria to invade his abdominal cavity. His family members were plunged into grief and near madness. Willie was interred in a borrowed vault in a cemetery in Georgetown. His father felt such acute misery that he visited the crypt many times to mourn and console himself. In a poignant scene, Saunders has Lincoln take his son’s remains from his coffin and hug him as if he were still among the quick.

Astounded with “delighted incredulity” that anybody would actually touch a “sick-form” are the ghosts with which Saunders populates the cemetery in Georgetown. They are dead people who don’t realize that they are as dead as doornails. They are so attached to concerns of the world – money, sex, guilt, family life, love, beauty, regret, productivity, applause, etc. etc.  - that they don’t realize they should leave the bardo, a transitional space between life and death or between the life just lived and the next incarnation.  

As befits magical realism and a good ghost story, points are left obscure, because the more opaque, the more shadowy and inspiring of the sense of wonder. So though ghosts believe that their fellow haints are sometimes enticed out of the bardo by lying demons disguised as loved ones, there’s no reason to assume they are correct. Without explaining why (how should they know?), the ghosts do seem to be correct that the bardo puts children in jeopardy, because of the grotesque fate of a teenage girl that needn’t be described here. Three well-intentioned ghosts try to implement a plan to move Willie on.

Saunder’s overview of the bardo is amazing, ingenious, fascinating. Curiosity, morbid and not, impels the reader further and further into the novel, and therefore into its supernatural universe, so dismal and musty, unknown and full of mystery impossible to fathom. The use of simple words and grammar is impressive. The ghosts kid themselves with euphemisms. Coinages of bardo jargon ("the matterlightblooming phenomenon") and obsolete words (“drear”) mingle. Different ghosts talk in different registers to correspond to their time period and character, or lack of it.

The writing has drive and force and laughs, the dialogues lively between the well-drawn characters, especially the three protagonist-ghosts. Saunders can develop powerful images, too, such as that of a gangling Lincoln who, dressed in black and wiry awkward bent with anguish, rides at night on a small horse with his feet almost scraping the ground. Also cartoonish but impressive are the descriptions of the manifestations of the ghosts. Punctuation disappears completely though mercifully not for very long and never beyond the ken of a veteran reader of Faulkner.

I’m not widely read in contemporary paranormal fiction or magical realism, so I can’t judge how original or extravagant or daring Saunders is with the supernatural elements. There are some lapses of taste and some mawkishness here and there. But overall I think that this novel is an incredible read, provoking thought about death, inevitability, memory, nonattachment, and equanimity in the shadow of loss of people, places, situations and concerns, loss that is out of our control.

Incidentally, after his father's assassination, Willie’s body was exhumed. His coffin accompanied his father’s on the train back to Illinois. He was interred in a cemetery in Springfield alongside the remains of his father and brother, Edward B. (Eddy) Lincoln, who had died at the age of three in 1850.